SHIFT Inc. supports customers in creating services that sell, providing comprehensive IT solutions ranging from software quality assurance and testing to digital transformation support and AI solutions.

The company hosts the “89Festival (Bug Festival)” annually as an information-sharing IT event to express its gratitude to its customers. Originally held offline, it moved online after the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, there was a growing demand for websites that featured attractive presentations to attract participants and systems to streamline operations.

However, challenges unique to online events also became apparent. This is why the company commissioned SHIFT ASIA to develop the 89Festival website.

We spoke with a member of the company’s design department about the challenges behind this initiative, the role of SHIFT ASIA in contributing to it, and the results achieved.

Understanding the 89Festival

What kind of event is the 89Festival?

The 89Festival represents SHIFT Inc.’s flagship customer engagement initiative, a large-scale IT conference that embodies the company’s commitment to fostering excellence within the engineering community. The event’s unique name, pronounced “Bug Festival,” pays homage to August 9th, recognized internationally as Software Bug Day, and has been a cornerstone of SHIFT’s customer relations strategy since its inception in 2017.

What began as an expression of gratitude to customers has evolved into a comprehensive knowledge-sharing platform dedicated to improving the IT engineering work environment. The festival features diverse sessions covering critical industry topics, including software quality assurance, testing methodologies, digital transformation strategies, artificial intelligence applications, cybersecurity, and system development practices. This breadth of content ensures participants gain valuable insights into current IT trends and practical problem-solving approaches.

The event’s success is reflected in its impressive growth trajectory, culminating in approximately 2,000 attendees at the 2024 festival. Behind this success lies the dedicated work of SHIFT’s Design Department, which manages the complete event ecosystem, from initial concept and planning through design execution, photography, website development, and comprehensive web marketing campaigns.

What are the characteristics of 89Festival?

The festival embodies SHIFT’s fundamental business philosophy of “grand meddlesomeness,” a distinctive cultural approach that demonstrates the company’s unwavering commitment to going above and beyond for its customers. This philosophy is evident throughout the festival, as an uncompromising commitment to delivering exceptional value to every participant, regardless of the effort required.

Strategic Priorities: User Experience Excellence

What aspects of the 89Festiva website do you prioritize?

The 89Festival website serves dual purposes: attracting customers while providing them with an enjoyable, engaging experience. This dual function drives our intensive focus on UI/UX design.

Beyond ensuring easy navigation and information accessibility, we place particular emphasis on creating enjoyable user experiences. Every year, we incorporate diverse content and features that users can explore after logging in. We’ve previously integrated gamification elements such as Sugoroku games and reward systems tied to session attendance or viewing frequency.

Each year brings numerous creative proposals from across our company; colleagues suggest, “We want to try this approach,” or “It would be exciting to incorporate this type of system.” However, the journey from compiling these requirements to actual implementation presents significant challenges. Nevertheless, I believe this culture of free thinking and continuous innovation challenges makes SHIFT unique.

What challenges or concerns did you encounter when creating the website?

We maintain high expectations that the 89Festival website will create a positive, engaging environment that event participants genuinely enjoy. Simultaneously, we require robust systems that enable smooth content registration and management.

However, the event’s dynamic nature means that program content and speakers are often not finalized until the last minute, making it difficult to solidify detailed requirements and create advanced specifications. Our production staff must proceed on the assumption that specifications will constantly evolve.

Full-scale planning typically solidifies just one to two months before the event. The schedule remains extremely tight, with additions and corrections sometimes occurring even on the day of the website launch. This environment requires our production team to demonstrate extraordinary flexibility and responsiveness.

Every year, I worry extensively about enhancing customer enjoyment and inevitably overload our schedule until the final moments.

Strategic Partnership: The key was communication

Please tell us why you chose us as your partner.

For the 89Festival website development, specifications changed rapidly within short timeframes, necessitating a development partner capable of flexible, quick responses.

We couldn’t afford to create detailed specifications and instructions for every change, so we had to communicate requests through chat and meetings, which required immediate responses. We even implemented significant structural changes from a web marketing perspective during the customer acquisition period.

As SHIFT ASIA is a group company, we’ve collaborated with them multiple times previously. What impressed us most consistently was their willingness to work alongside us even when specifications weren’t solidified, plus their proactive approach in proposing and implementing ideas we hadn’t considered.

Beyond delivering high quality, we were impressed by the speed and flexibility of their project managers and the exceptional development capabilities of their engineers. SHIFT ASIA’s ability to quickly propose specific specifications and implementation methods in response to our vague ideas and abstract requests was a major factor in our selection decision.

What kind of work did SHIFT ASIA handle?

SHIFT ASIA was responsible for building the backend infrastructure of our customer attraction website and developing the event website’s comprehensive admin panel.

The admin panel incorporates diverse functionality, including event measurement features that track “which users watched what content, which materials they downloaded,” and “what reactions occurred to which programs at specific times.” This enables event organizers to gain detailed, real-time insights into event status and participant engagement.

Furthermore, the admin panel offers extensive features and interfaces, including capabilities for submitting and editing program information and viewing and managing archived videos. While we primarily developed the concepts and requirements, SHIFT ASIA was responsible for creating specific specifications and implementing them to realize our vision.

Please tell us about the overall schedule for the 89 Festival website development.

Event planning and requirements were solidified to a reasonable extent approximately one month before the festival. From that point, SHIFT began building the customer-facing website frontend while SHIFT ASIA simultaneously worked on backend construction and event website administration screen development.

We also requested that SHIFT ASIA continue development after the event concluded, including developing functionality to make archives publicly available. The total development time for SHIFT ASIA was approximately six weeks.

How did website development progress?

Requirements inevitably change frequently during event preparation, making traditional documentation-heavy approaches impractical for our timeline. We adopted an agile methodology, communicating requirements to the SHIFT ASIA development team primarily through chat and meetings, where we discussed and refined details as production progressed.

The SHIFT ASIA development team provided suggestions and feedback that exceeded our expectations, which proved extremely helpful throughout the process.

Achieving quality that satisfies thousands of participants

What results did you achieve through the website?

For this event, we needed to register over 100 sessions within a short timeframe, and we were impressed by the intuitive UI of the admin screen SHIFT ASIA created. Particularly notable was that event staff could operate the system immediately without special instruction—the admin screen was designed so anyone could intuitively understand its functionality just by looking at it.

As a result, we significantly reduced the workload required for staff explanations and documentation creation, enabling very smooth preparation processes.

SHIFT ASIA also responded flexibly and quickly to event-specific requirements, such as minor specification changes that arose on launch day, measurement system adjustments for individual programs, and system email distribution to registrants. Thanks to their support, we have established a development system that can confidently handle sudden additions or changes.

The website received positive feedback from event participants, with its design and mechanisms successfully conveying the “fun” aspect of our event. We believe we achieved quality that satisfied thousands of participants only through SHIFT ASIA’s collaboration.

This was an offshore development effort. How did you receive the results?

The SHIFT ASIA team lead was Vietnamese but demonstrated exceptional Japanese fluency, enabling smooth communication without language barriers. Although there’s a two-hour time difference between Japan and Vietnam, SHIFT ASIA’s business hours align with Japanese development companies, allowing us to collaborate as if working with a domestic partner. With remote work becoming standard in Japan, our interactions with SHIFT ASIA progressed as naturally and efficiently as meetings with Japanese team members.

What particularly impressed us was that SHIFT ASIA engineers didn’t simply build according to instructions—they actively considered how to make the product more user-friendly. We were impressed by their rapid development speed and meticulous attention to detail.

Honestly, we had minimal concerns about offshore development; their results exceeded our expectations, and their attentive service enabled us to entrust the project with complete confidence.

Our reputation within the company has grown through our flexible and prompt responses during the 89 Festival project, and we’re now receiving SHIFT ASIA support for larger, longer-term projects.

Future Vision and Expansion: A development partner who will accompany you

What are your future prospects?

The SHIFT Group’s overall business scale expands annually, and the 89 Festival scale grows accordingly. Moving forward, we hope to develop it into a venue where people from various industries and companies, as well as experts from diverse fields, can gather to share knowledge and experience.

We also plan to evolve the event into a hybrid format, incorporating both offline and online elements. We hope to invite customers who have only met us online to participate in person, allowing us to express our gratitude face-to-face.

We aim to continue evolving the event, consistently providing participants with “fun” and “new discoveries.”

A word of advice for customers considering offshore development

Some people may have concerns about offshore development due to language, cultural, and geographical barriers; however, SHIFT ASIA demonstrates flexibility and accommodation, even for last-minute requests and same-day revisions. Communication was extremely smooth and stress-free.

The management screen they developed for this project was remarkably user-friendly; we were surprised that our management team could work intuitively without any explanation. We trust their approach to working with us, which involves thinking through challenges and proactively suggesting and implementing solutions, even when specifications aren’t finalized.

For companies seeking to create robust solutions within limited timeframes or those looking for development partners who will collaborate closely to develop solutions, SHIFT ASIA represents an excellent choice. If you’re considering offshore development, we recommend contacting SHIFT ASIA.